Avestan Aa: The Letter in the Avestan Alphabet

This letter writes the long open a, the same vowel as its short partner but sustained. Nothing else separates the two: the tongue sits in the same place, the mouth opens to the same degree, and duration alone tells one word from another. The sixteen vowel letters come first in the sequence, before any consonant, and they are set out in pairs of short and long. The arrangement is inherited from nowhere. The tradition that supplied the letterforms had no such vowel series and no reason to order one this way, so the pattern comes from an analysis of the language the script was built to hold. It stands second in the alphabet as a whole and second of the sixteen vowel letters, between Avestan A and Avestan Ao. That position is not arbitrary. The sequence follows a scheme, vowels before consonants and consonants by place of articulation, and each letter's place in it is a statement about the sound.

Zoroastrian worship treats the correct sounding of the Avesta as part of the act itself. A priest is expected to produce the words as they have been received, and a sign that could stand for either of two sounds would put that in doubt. The size of this letter list follows from the requirement and not from any love of complication. Transliteration is where the size of the letter list becomes visible to a reader who does not know the script. A scholarly edition carries accents, dots, rings and length marks, and every one of those marks stands in for a separate Avestan letter that the Roman alphabet has no room for.